September 10, 2016
Tech giants like Apple, Amazon, and T-Mobile are directing all emergency donations for flooding in Louisiana exclusively to the American Red Cross, despite the corporatized charity’s mishandling of disaster relief efforts from Superstorm Sandy to Haiti to earlier flooding in Louisiana. / ProPublica
“The estimated annual dollar value of their output runs in the billions, while prisoner laborers make just cents per hour.” Involuntary servitude is illegal in America—except for “duly convicted” prisoners, who in the age of mass incarceration have ballooned into a cheap source of labor, fighting forest fires in California and working AT&T call centers for a pittance. / The Nib
Some hold out hope that climate change could be a good thing, but a Stanford study shows higher atmospheric CO2 won’t increase plant productivity. / Associated Press
John McCain’s Spanish-language campaign site plays up his work for comprehensive immigration reform. The English page, on the other hand, suggests (duplicitously?) a less welcoming stance. / The Washington Post
“Without HTTPS, it’s trivial for a hacker sitting in the same public WiFi you’re using, or government spies, to spy on you and interfere with the sites you go to trick you into giving up sensitive information.” In a bid to push the web toward full encryption, in January Google will start flagging sites as unsafe if they don’t use HTTPS. / Motherboard
“Most of us have had at least a moment, when doing actual work—a task with some degree of unpleasantness—of glancing at a manager who is sitting down off in some office and wondering, ‘Why the fuck is that person getting paid more than me?’ You may be happy to learn that this is a very good question. In fact, the Harvard Business Review has published a sort of back-of-the-envelope calculation that finds that the bloated ranks of management are likely costing our country trillions of dollars per year.” Fire the managers. / The Concourse
Appalachian families have harvested wild ginseng for side income for more than a century, but Chinese buyers have driven prices so high that crime and extinction threaten to eliminate the tradition. / Foreign Policy